03 / Daily operations

Agents & terminals

Keep your agents' native tools. Give their sessions a place to live.

Launch a ship

Open a project and press e, or choose Launch an agent from Home. Select an installed species and launch it in that folder. Agents remain at their projects between tasks until you dismiss them.

Empire uses the agent's normal launch defaults and permission controls. It does not grant blanket approval or replace the harness's sandbox. Authenticate the CLI in a normal terminal before launching it from Empire.

Talk in the native terminal

Open an agent row with Enter. Keys including Esc and Ctrl+C go to the agent. Use F12 or Ctrl+] to return to the project or galaxy.

Shift+Enter is forwarded as a distinct key on terminals with enhanced keyboard input. The agent decides how to interpret it. Alt+Enter and Ctrl+J also reach the agent for CLIs that use those newline shortcuts.

The mouse wheel uses the application's own scrolling support when available, otherwise Empire's terminal history. Drag to select and copy text. Shift+Page Up and Shift+Page Down move through Empire's history.

Ordinary terminals

Press b inside a project to open your normal shell in its folder. Open as many as you need for a development server, logs, Git commands or tests. Shells are listed separately from agents and keep stable labels such as Terminal #4.

Ordinary shells never take queued agent tasks or generate agent permission/completion alerts. Shell keystrokes and window titles do not become task labels or project-list previews.

Check finished work

A finished agent is ready for your review. Open the native terminal for the full conversation. Wider project views may show an excerpt of recent output, including testing instructions; that excerpt is not an independently verified summary.

Use a shell to run your checks, inspect the changes and decide what to commit. Multiple agents may share a folder, so consider separate worktrees when tasks need independent branches.

Dismiss a session

Select an agent or terminal and press x. Empire asks before closing it. To leave the view while keeping the session, use F12 or Ctrl+] instead.

Optional ship pulse

EMPIRE_ADVISOR_PULSE=1 can mark a working ship as looping (↻) or erroring (✖?). After 90 seconds of work it checks changed output at most once a minute. With advisor configuration it sends up to 2,000 characters from the last 25 nonblank screen lines and a 300-character task excerpt, with common secret patterns removed. Without configuration, or on a failed request, a local repeated-line check stands in after two minutes. Badges expire after five minutes or when work stops. They never interrupt the ship or send it instructions.